Arvind Ravikumar, The University of Texas at Austin

Innovations in technology are revolutionizing our approach to monitoring carbon emissions. Satellites, aerial and autonomous drone surveys, and continuous monitoring systems can now provide near real-time data on greenhouse gas emissions across global energy supply chains. Yet, our frameworks for carbon accounting still use methods originally developed in the 1990s, with the result being significant underestimation of our methane emissions in official inventories. What was once an academic exercise is now a major financial bottleneck: policies such as the methane fee in the Inflation Reduction Act and a growing market for differentiated natural gas require accurate carbon accounting at high spatial and temporal resolution. In this talk, I will discuss recent advances in multi-scale measurements of greenhouse gas emissions from energy supply chains, with a focus on technical approaches to incorporating data from new observational capabilities into developing improved emissions inventories. I will conclude with a discussion of new policies, market opportunities, and ways to build trust in our carbon accounting frameworks.